Friday, March 03, 2006

PHP Collaboration Project reaches major milestone

Last October, we announced the PHP Collaboration Project. The idea was to collaborate around selected areas in PHP to further enhance the overall PHP eco-system. At that time we mentioned three projects which we were planning to start. The Zend Framework, an Eclipse-based PHP IDE framework, and best practices. I'm happy to say that today all these three projects have made significant progress and with that we have reached the first milestone in this initiative.

The past few months have been great. We had many more than expected individuals and companies who showed interest in contributing. We managed to gather a relatively small but solid team of people to move all these projects forward. I'd like to thank everyone who has helped and worked hard (often on their free time) to make this happen.

We have finally updated the static PHP Collaboration Project page which now points to the individual projects which we have started:

- The Zend Framework - We have released a preview release of the Zend Framework. I'd like to thank all the initial contributors who have been of tremendous help in getting this off the ground. There is a lot of work still to do, but after having already seen four applications build with the framework, it is clear that it already includes some very cool and useful modules.

- The Eclipse PHP IDE framework - We have submitted a proposal to the Eclipse Foundation for a community based open-source PHP IDE framework. If all goes well in next week's creation review, we will be submitting the initial code drop shortly thereafter. In the spirit of Eclipse, we have already reached out to community members, including the PHP/Eclipse project, and have received great interest to join the effort.

- The Zend Developer Zone - We have launched our new developer zone. The goal of this developer zone is to provide best practices with high-quality content from partners and the community. We already have many companies and invidiuals lined up to collaborate around this site who will share their knowledge for the benefit of the PHP community. The site will cover many aspects of best practices including Zend Framework use, interoperating with other technologies, and general PHP best practices around subjects such as security. The Zend Developer Zone is still under active development so expect further changes in the coming week.

I'd like to thank again the many people who have helped out with these three projects. I have no doubt that they will benefit the PHP community.